But it was an eerily nervous order. We had no idea how the Romanians would deal with us. Our father stayed in the city all day long to find out how the situation was evolving. We children were strictly forbidden to exchange so much as a single word with any stranger. Of course, we were not to go beyond the garden under any circumstance. (Nor were we allowed to do so later on without accompaniment, and when once I did so, my punishment was draconian.) But this seclusion was difficult to maintain. Like all children of a nation at war, we were enthusiastically patriotic but at the same time ardently attracted to anything military, even in the form of an enemy. When Romanian troops marched by, I could not be restrained; I had to get to the garden fence to see it all. In so doing one day, I had failed to consider that I was holding in my hands a doll called “The German Brother’’: a childlike soldier in a field-gray uniform and with a black-white-and-red cockade decorating the German recruit’s visorless cap covering his blond locks (the very same headgear the sight of which, five years earlier, because it had been mistaken for Russian, had caused our first flight). A sergeant of the Romanian battalion filing past saw this toy and in a rage ran over to me, reached through the fence, tore the offending object from my hands and flung it, cursing, into the gutter. But he hadn’t noticed Cassandra, who, driven by the same curiosity as my own, had joined me at the fence. A wild sow whose piglet has been threatened could not have broken from the underbrush with fiercer speed: she threw herself with such uninhibited vehemence against the iron fenceposts that the sergeant, frightened, jumped back. A torrent of bawdy Romanian curses was loosed on him which, together with the weird appearance of the scolding fury, triggered a wave of derisive laughter in the troop. Had there not been this outburst of rude amusement, Cassandra’s impetuosity could have cost her dearly: without a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed a handful of earth and flung it after the retreating figure. She could have been shot on the spot.
All memory of early childhood is episodic, embedded in the moods of separate periods which later we interpret as stages of our development. It is a year later, a summer day of almost unbearable heat. The foliage of the trees around the house hangs listless. Our mother exacerbates her growing fear of just such threats even though the times are by now more peacefuclass="underline" we are citizens of the Kingdom of Romania. My father’s monarchism has proven to be more enduring than his Austrian patriotism: he prefers the monarchy with a foreign language to the now exclusively German-speaking republic of the shrunken Austrian rump state, contrary to my mother, who feels like an exile cast out in an inferior culture, a world full of menacing forces, including climatic ones. A hot day such as this hatches unforeseeable perils. It is only natural, therefore, that on a sudden impulse it is decided to drive to the nearest lookout point in the gently rolling landscape. Even though the difference in elevation is minimal, it might be expected that the air would be cooler there, where large tracts of forest abounded.
In those days, such excursions were not made easily. One drove in horse carriages that took hours; to protect oneself against the sun, parasols were taken along, together with dusters, as well as blankets and overcoats for the return in the evening. Since there was no inn along the way, cold drinks were brought in thermos bottles and sandwiches were packed in baskets. And toys: thin loops of reed that were thrown in the air with small sticks and then caught again with swordlike thrusts; balls; and of course, my sister’s diabolo game, that hourglass cone rotating on a string stretched between two sticks, which was thrown up whirring high above and caught once more to run back and forth along the length of the string with micelike fleetness. Mother liked to watch us playing these tame games harking back to her own youth. They soon bored us to tears.
Usually, when Cassandra came along, I was excused from these choreographic, rather than sportive, exercises. On the pretext that under all circumstances I had to avoid congesting my affected lungs, we withdrew to the shade of some tall trees in a grove. This is the key image of that period and bearer of its mood (I would have been just over five years old at the time): in the wide-open expanse of the landscape stands one of those clumps of splendid trees in the mighty crowns of which golden orioles are whistling and warblers are flying hither and thither. A light breeze sweeps over the fields, where one can hear the rustling of the dry corn sheaves; big pumpkins with yellow-white and black-green tiger stripes lie heavily on the rich black earth, attached to their hairy vines. Far away the call of a cuckoo is heard and the warble of bobwhites; closer by, frogs croak in the reeds of a swampy water hole; a stork stalks with careful deliberation under the willows of a brook, then slowly rises over their crowns with a heavy flapping of its wings and flies off. Cassandra cradles me in her arms and tells me a fairy tale.
But this time Cassandra hadn’t come along. Mother didn’t quite trust yet the newly established peace and even less the good-natured disposition of the rural population, which had run wild during the war and was in any case degenerating as a result of the city’s proximity. Therefore as many people as possible had to come along for protection and proper supervision: everybody went with the exception of Cassandra and the maids, who were given one of their rare days off. Cassandra stayed home because someone had to take care of the house, and much to our chagrin the dogs stayed with her — to defend the house and her and, chiefly, because it was feared that they would go hunting on their own if let loose in the fields.
Dogs played an important part in our childhood. There was at least one dog for each member of the family and all of them were instinctively drawn to Cassandra. They acknowledged her as an authority in the hierarchy of the household on the strength of her being, so to say, their own companion in fate and dependent on their common masters. But strangely enough, and notwithstanding their passionate love for my father and for us, it was Mother whom the dogs considered the supreme authority. They had — and I cannot express it more clearly — an order of rank ascending from secular precedence to spiritual supremacy. With the exception of the dogs, all of us trembled under my mother’s febrile humors as under a metaphysical power that could not be explained rationally and even less could be denied. She embodied the eternally threatening and fragile nature of all existence. The drama of life confronted her at every moment with the potential to turn suddenly into tragedy. She saw it as her duty to prevent the worst by constantly alerting everyone around her to watch out. (Had she realized that the name of Cassandra fitted her better than it did my nurse, she would have been deeply offended.) In any case, the dogs seemed to sense her innate and tragic comprehension of the ever threatening evil in all existence, and whenever a storm gathered they all sought refuge at her feet.